The audience at the new Robot Wars. BBC Two/Instagram

Last week a freakishly human-like robot, demonstrated at SXSW, grinned, responded to human facial cues, claimed that it wanted to start a family, and asked to be recognized as a person. If that has you cowering in fear, you may long for a lost epoch when robots firmly knew their place: not stealing our jobs or winning Chinese super-chess tournaments, but smashing the shit out of each other on early evening television; a time when the nation would gather 'round as one to watch cobbled-together weaponized shoeboxes slam into each for 45 minutes.

Well those days are back. Earlier this year, it was announced that Robot Wars would be returning to the BBC. They're yet to announce a transmission date, but internet speculation is rife as to whether the new episodes will live up to (probably quite rose-tinted memories) of its cult predecessor. Have health and safety developments over the last 15 years impinged on the legality of soldering an angle grinder to a souped-up remote-controlled car? Will the new presenting duo take the lead of Craig Charles and be outfitted in really bad leather jackets? Does the script leave room for a bizarre rhyming segment at the end of each episode?

The Channel 5 incarnation of the show with Craig Charles, Jayne Middlemiss and Sir Killalot. Channel 5

A determination to answer these questions was how I found myself hanging around a sprawling industrial estate a few miles outside of Glasgow last weekend at a Robot Wars taping. Don't be afraid though, I'm not going to spoil anything. Having only seen part of one episode, I'm not in much of a position to preempt whatever narrative the producers decide to shoehorn in during the editing process. What I did see, over the course of about three hours, was a full nine minutes of intense robo-combat and the odd segment with likable new presenters Dara O'Briain and Angela Scanlon, a relative newcomer to UK screens. Hundreds were packed in to watch the action, safely encamped behind what we were reassured were "bulletproof" screens.

The robots that make it through to the later rounds of the series, which is what we seemed to be watching, are sturdier, more ruthless, and the least likely to go straight up in flames. This tends to mean that there's a lot less wanton destruction by this point in the competition, a shame for those of us who enjoyed watching that red polka dot thing that entered five different series of Robot Warsand was, memorably, covered in highly flammable fur—there's literally an hour-long montage on YouTube of it continually going on fire, series after series.

My fears were borne out by the final rounds, where it felt like a lot of time was spent watching two precision-engineered, indistinct boxes slam into each other for 180 seconds. As ever, the best way of disabling your opponent remains trying to get it on its back and hope it can't upright itself. But our budding roboteers know this too, meaning that being flipped over is not the harbinger of doom that it once was. Thankfully though the house robots are still on hand to mess shit up and bash robots around when a contest is beginning to grate.

Once or twice, competing robots managed to knock bits off each other, sending shrapnel flying into barriers. Although this was rarely debilitating, it was enough to keep the attention of the audience of kids dragged along by their over eager dads and grown men in Doctor Who T-shirts.

As is the way with filming a TV program with a complicated technical set-up and mechanized fighting machines, there was also a lot of down time, as the competitors scrabbled around in the background trying to get their prized robots ready for the next fight. Meanwhile, the audience were left to suffer at the hands of the mind numbing warm-up act, who larked about in the arena telling shit jokes and throwing around Haribo like the second-rate panto performer he probably is.

By the time these clashes reach your screens, they'll be edited together from a dozen different camera angles and have Match of the Day's Jonathan Pearce shouting excitably over them. Pearce's role has been remarked on as the continuity of personnel between the old and new series, but in reality, little else seems to have changed.

Robotics, warfare, and artificial intelligence have all advanced unimaginably from 15 years ago, but there didn't seem to be much sign of that on show in the studio. Basically, you may be disappointed if you're expecting incoming drones and laser-guided destruction. From what I saw at least, real innovation was cast aside in favor of what is basically a segway with a flamethrower duct-taped on.

Jeremy Clarkson hosted the first series of the show. BBC

The three judges—who decide the outcome of battles without a decisive winner—are all distinguished academics in the field of robotics. For a show which is about robots fighting each other, this pretense of scientific credibility has always felt a bit over the top, a sort of excuse for license fee payers funding the whole exercise. One judge, Dr. Lucy Roberts, it was boasted, has even been working on robots capable of carrying out missions on the surface of Mars. What this expert in ground breaking interplanetary technology made of seeing a series of armored toasters ram into each other over the course of a fortnight was, sadly, never expanded upon.

Why can't we see Sgt. Bash fly above a robot's head and destroy it silently, US drone-style, or Sir Killalot hurt a robot's feeling by saying its paintjob looks sloppy? Robot Wars is still fun and stupid, but if it's going to be the only show on TV about this rapidly changing field, it seems a generation out of touch.

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Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders. Photo by Jake Kivanc.

A new campaign set to target the growing number of fentanyl overdose deaths in Ontario was unveiled by the Ontario Association of Police Chiefs (OAPC) Tuesday.

The "Face the Fentanyl" campaign, a partnership between Humber College and OAPC, aims to "expand awareness" about the lethality of the drug and provide better access to services such as naloxone, an opioid overdose-reducing antidote .

"In 2015, overdose increased to 254 people," said Toronto city Coun. Joe Cressy.

"We could have saved those people's lives if we had chosen to act."

The number of people in Toronto who died from drug overdose climbed 41 percent between 2004 and 2013, and more than 5,000 people died in overdoses across Ontario between 2001 and 2013. With fentanyl now the leading cause of opioid overdose in Ontario—accounting for roughly one in four of all fatal overdoses—Cressy said the province could run into a crisis similar to the one currently taking place in Alberta.

"We have to prevent these needless deaths while we still can, while we are only dealing with this on a controllable scale. Because we can do it."

In Alberta, bootleg fentanyl—pressed pills made out of pure synthesized fentanyl powder—is a huge problem that accounted for roughly one in three overdoses in the province last year. In Ontario, the problem largely stems from stolen pharmaceutical fentanyl patches, although some reports of fentanyl powder have started to crop up.

Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders told reporters that the answer is "not to arrest people," but rather to provide services so drug users don't die from overdose.

"We can't arrest our way through this thing," he said. "It's about the awareness and understanding about the loss of life that we're having "

When asked whether the proposed safe injection site plan would be a part of the new campaign, Saunders declined to immediately comment but said he would have to examine whether the plan was safe and effective. However, Cressy told VICE that safe injection sites are going to be "vital" in making sure that "no more people die from this drug."

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Photo via Flickr user Pascal

On March 3, the Portland Police Bureau set up a sting. Their mark, Pavel Kuzik, was a seasoned criminal who had already been in trouble several times for theft and deceit—he even showed up to meet undercover officers in a stolen car. What was the alleged crime that led the cops to target the 25-year-old? Stealing Legos from Fred Meyer, then reselling them online.

"Lego thief" sounds like an occupation that only exists in crowdfunded Zach Braff movies, but stealing the surprisingly pricey colored blocks is a lucrative trade according to Portland Police Sergeant Peter Simpson.

"There's a 'black' or secondary market for everything, especially things of value," he told me. "Legos are a hot item due to their popularity and relative cost from retail markets. Virtually untraceable––no serial numbers––and easily sold."

Authorities say that boosting crews complete with drivers, lookouts, pickers and fences, have become increasingly common across the country since the beginning of the Great Recession. According to the National Retail Federation, 30 states have passed laws regarding organized retail crime (ORC) since 2008. Though Legos aren't mentioned in the group's most recent report, anecdotal evidence suggests that they're a popular choice with professional-level shoplifters.

For instance, this past June, a five-person team was arrested in San Diego for allegedly taking more than $15,000 worth of toys, mostly Lego. In 2014, Phoenix cops busted an even bigger ring and seized $200,000 of illicit Legos. There's also Gloria Haas, a Long Island woman who was accused that same year of taking $59,000 worth of Lego from a storage unit. This December, a 43-year-old was caught on camera stealing a $450 R2D2 Lego replica, in Beaverton, Oregon, and one person even bashed in a Vancouver, Canada, store window to grab a single box of the plastic bricks.

As phrases like "$450 R2D2 Lego replica" suggest, these products can be extremely expensive, and they're not usually guarded by stores in the same way that electronics are. According to Tommy Williamson, who runs the website bricknerd.com, while Legos have never been cheap, they've become even pricier in the past 15 years. He explained to me that after a downturn in the late 90s, Lego embraced licensing deals that led to sets from the Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Frozen universes appearing on shelves. Those products are the ones that tend to be the most expensive, and therefore the most attractive to criminals. For example, one called the Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon goes for almost $4,000. (Williamson pointed to a handful of articles from December that claimed Lego was more valuable than gold for the value of that set going up.)

He also pointed out that another prevalent Lego crime is for people to steal individual pieces and plastic people from sets and then return the sets to the store. The parts are then sold on bricklink.com, which is a site frequented by collectors and megafans.

"We consider those people scumbags," Williamson said of the thieves. "Those people who are doing that tend to have large collections and stores to fund their hobbies, but they give us a bad name. We know the people doing this tend to be fans, but they're also fans of the dark side."

A spokesperson for Lego did not immediately return a request for comment.

Meanwhile, police haven't indicated if they think Kuzik was operating alone or as part of a ring. No new details about his case will be released until the investigation is over, according to a spokesperson for the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office. However, Lego crime just seems like a natural extension of his rap sheet, which also includes burglary, identity theft, and stealing from a Target store. For someone like that, ripping off Lego sets may have been a racket too profitable to pass up.

"I would not say that we have a large black market for plastic bricks," says Peter Simpson, the Portland cop. "But like in any big city, there are always people willing to buy discounted goods without asking any questions."

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Video Vision and its famous murals of cool psychopaths. All photos by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

On his 87th birthday, Leo Gaigals bought himself a berry cheesecake and delivered it to his only friends—the guys down the road at the last independent video store in Melbourne, Australia. Five days later, Video Vision would be dead.

In his 18 years visiting the shop, Gaigals had rented around 14,000 films, which the employees figured out by discovered looking up his records. "We're his family," says owner Eddie Stefani. "We do everything for him—whether it's go to the shops, ring up his doctor, fill in forms. Once we're gone, I don't know what he's going do. And he's just one of the many."

When the "For Lease" signs went up, Gaigals began buying lottery tickets, hoping to help keep the shop afloat. But with the rise of home-viewing options like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, Stefani can't afford to keep the store open and is shutting down on Wednesday, much to the dismay of the local community.

Craig Martin in his weekend castle.

"Everyone's really sad about it," weekend manager Craig Martin tells me over a slice of cake in his makeshift office in the storeroom, where desks are piled with papers and DVDs. Stefani sits behind his PC, doing the administrative work using the program VideoMinder, which holds the shop's 65,000 titles; one of the largest film collections in Australia.

"Up until two years ago even, the place was still jamming," says Stefani. But when Netflix was launched, rentals plummeted. Since closing was announced, customers have delivered chocolates and cards, and some have choked up at the front desk. One family, after hearing the news, even moved from their home in St Kilda, where the shop is located, to Caulfield North. "I never knew it had that effect on people," Stefani tells me.

A last photo of the Video Vision team

Over almost two decades of operation, Video Vision has been a favorite for film-buffs, families, drunks, and plenty of thieves. Martin recalls the time a drunk guy in a sailor suit had to be dissuaded from eating a six-year-old McDonald's burger and fries that sat infamously mold-free behind the front counter. Last year, a member of the staff accidentally knocked it to the floor, where it shattered like glass.

The desk where dreams were rented

There was the grandmother with a penchant for action films, the kid obsessed with Buffy and Smallville, and a guy who only ever rented American Pie films—the staff gave him the set as a parting gift. More than 100 copies of Chopper have been bought over the years to replace those stolen. (At a close second came any Guy Ritchie film and Napolean Dynamite.) The dumbest question the team have ever been asked: "How long is a weekly rental for?"

Probably one of more genuinely upsetting horror sections.

"I always wanted to have a 'shit' section," laughs Stefani, extolling the virtues of watching bad films "so you know what not to do." Part of the tragedy of the closure, adds Martin—who is also a college film-lecturer—is the fact that customers will no longer be exposed to films outside their usual range. On-demand services like Netflix create tunnel vision. The company utilizes an algorithm to determine users' taste and supply them with more of the same.

"Accessing stuff from home is this sort of alienated, atomized way of being, as opposed to going down to your local, asking questions, getting recommendations, and seeing stuff that you would never think about seeing," says Martin. "The way to keep your mind young is to not watch the same thing over and over again." He says the "diet of multiplex" means obscure and foreign films held by independent stores like Video Vision will disappear into the ether, as they can't be viewed with software like Netflix, and are usually otherwise only accessible as illegal downloads.

A very recent photo of the guys stripping everything out.

With this in mind, his parting recommendations are Bagdad Café, Another Woman, Wings of Desire, and The Swimmer. Stefani's are Les Diables, Aussie Park Boyz, and Straight Story.

Stefani looks stumped when I ask what he'll do next. "This! I'd like to do this! This is what I love, but it's gone."

The next tenant, a cleanskin wine store, plans to graft an entire wall with a photo of its previous incarnation.

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Goodbye friend.

Marine Le Pen. Photo via Facebook.

Snubbed, heckled, and chased out of her own hotel: Marine Le Pen's trip to Quebec was not a success.

The welcome mat remained conspicuously rolled up, and every high profile politician from Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre to the architect of the Parti Québécois' controversial Charter of Values, Bernard Drainville, loudly told anyone listening that the leader of France's best-known far-right party, the Front National, was not welcome.

Which came as absolutely no surprise to anyone, except, perhaps, Marine Le Pen and her team. What the hell was she thinking?

On Monday night, outside her hotel in downtown Montreal, I asked Jaggi Singh that question. Singh, a well-known anarchist activist, had just addressed about 100 or so anti-Le Pen protesters who'd gathered in front of the Chateau Champlain before punching play on an iPod. The set list, blaring from a nearby loudspeaker, featured familiar protest songs, songs in Arabic, and an appropriate few by French '80s punk legends Bérurier Noir.

"I have no idea" why she came to Quebec, Singh said. "Anyone who aspires to be a mainstream French politician winds up doing these foreign tours. But I don't want to put myself into her head."

Protesters gather outside Marine Le Pen's Montreal hotel. Photo by Patrick Lejtenyi.

It was never going to be easy for Le Pen. One by one, Quebec's political elite declared they wanted nothing to do with her. Not the Couillard Liberals, not the opposition PQ. "We don't have a single minute to spare for that person," sniffed a PQ spokesperson. Two other parties, one the right-leaning CAQ, the other the avowedly left-wing Québec solidaire, also received, and declined, invitations to meet her, as did the mayor of Quebec City. The spokesperson for Denis Coderre, a former federal Liberal immigration minister, said they hadn't received an invitation and would have turned it down if they did.

Things didn't get much better as the trip went on. After publicly bashing Quebec and Canada's immigration policies and its political leaders on various media appearances over the weekend, she headed up to the provincial capital for a press conference Sunday.

That press conference had all the dignity and gravitas of a Donald Trump rally, as a group of about 10 protesters got in and chanted anti-Le Pen, anti-fascist slogans. "OK kids, a quick shower then bed time," she snarled.

Then, on Monday, as the protest outside her hotel was in full swing, the Chateau Champlain's management stated it had cancelled a Front National reception. She wound up addressing supporters in a sports bar, and her press conference scheduled for Tuesday was cancelled.

Her visit wasn't a total waste for her though, thanks to the horrors in Belgium. Her line was predictable enough: "I don't get the sense that Islamic fundamentalism is being treated like the threat it really is," she told reporters. "And just like I saw in France in the past, here in Canada, whoever condemns Islamic fundamentalism is accused of Islamophobia."

Still, a morning's worth of quotes is a pretty poor return on a trip that is already being hailed as a failure. The French newspaper Le Figaro is calling her visit a "fiasco." Hotels are cancelling or declining her reservations. The whole thing reeks of an organization that doesn't know what it's doing, according to McGill University's Daniel Weinstock.

"This is a sign of political amateurism in the Front National," he says. "If you're a serious candidate for the presidency, you don't do things like this without doing a lot of advance work, so you can avoid surprises. And clearly, this wasn't done."

Weinstock speculates that Le Pen was perhaps counting on a warmer welcome from the province and political party that came up with the Charter of Values, the PQ policy platform that would have barred "ostentatious" displays of religious paraphernalia—think the hijab or the kippah. But he says she badly miscalculated the thinking behind the charter, which he says, misguided though it may have been, was designed to be inclusive rather than exclusive. At any rate, the charter and the PQ were both roundly rejected in the 2014 election.

"She should have known this," he says, adding that someone on her team didn't do their homework. "You don't do without having anyone willing to do a photo op."

Le Pen's visit is scheduled to conclude with a trip to St. Pierre et Miquelon, a pair of French-owned islands just off the south coast of Newfoundland before she leaves for home at the end of the week.

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter.

Photo via Facebook

Rob Ford died today at the age of 46, about a year and a half after he learned he had cancer. While Ford rose to international infamy due to his crack-smoking admission, racist tirades and the general mayhem he brought to Toronto, he was the favourite son of the former city of Etobicoke for a pretty long time. It was there that Ford Nation, the loose association of fiscal conservatives and angry suburbanites that led to his mayoral victory in 2010, was born.

Smile, you're deeper in debt! Photo via The Canadian Press

As you may have noticed today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled his first budget. And he did it all by himself!

Illustrations by George Heaven

Homelessness is a massive problem in Jamaica. As of 2015, the unemployment rate in the country was 13.2 percent among adults, and a staggering 38 percent among youth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in January this year, the Jamaica Observer revealed a 26 percent rise in homelessness over the past three years. The problem is particularly prevalent amongst the country's LGBTQ community, who comprise at least 40 percent of the overall homeless youth population.

Jamaica is not known for its progressive views on queer issues. In 2006, Time magazine asked if the island was "the most homophobic place on Earth." In 2014, a Human Rights Watch report found that over half of respondents in Jamaica had experienced violence on the basis of their identified gender or sexuality. Reports of corrective rape and the mob murder of gender queer youth Dwayne Jones have also made the headlines in recent years. Across the 1990s, dancehall fast became one of Jamaica's biggest exports, but it has been well documented how many of the scene's biggest stars performed lyrics that openly incited homophobia. While in the 1970s and 1980s the gay rights movement operated much more freely (the country even had known gay clubs and visible LGBTQ space), today activists conduct clandestine operations and hold discreet gatherings as mounting homophobic sentiments pervade public discourse.

Back in 2014, VICE News covered a group of queer homeless youth in Kingston, colloquially referred to as the "Gully Queens." This was part of an outpouring of international concern over the country's queer homelessness problem. Despite widespread media attention in the wake of VICE News's report, the very same group of homeless youth are still on the streets, and the hoped-for improvements have not yet materialized.

Part of the reason LGBTQ communities are so neglected in Jamaica might be due to the fact that almost 70 percent of the country identifies as Christian. Amongst many of them, it is believed that acceptance of LGBTQ persons is akin to turning one's back on God.

On the other side of the fence, seeking help from within the LGBTQ community is complex. As part of the investigation for the new episode of the VICELAND series GAYCATION, which focuses on the current state of LGBTQ life in Jamaica, Yvonne McCalla-Sobers, a leading Jamaican human rights activist and co-founder of LGBTQ-friendly shelter Dwayne's House, tries to explain the mentality: "LGBT persons who are able to have well-paying jobs, drive high-end vehicles, live in gated communities, will have few issues of homophobia, and they want to keep it that way so that they don't have to pay much attention to our youth here," she said. " class prejudice mixed with why are you doing this to draw attention to us? To make us look bad? "

This is not necessarily to say that there is a lack of sympathy for the homeless youth across the board among the middle-class members of the LGBTQ community. Rather, as J-Flag, Jamaica's leading LGBTQ rights organization stated in its 2013 Annual Report: "The diversity of Jamaica's LGBT community has been masked by the advocacy and media narratives that have focused on victimhood, crime and violence, sex and HIV." Therefore, when choosing issues to campaign for year on year, the middle-class members of the LGBTQ rights movement may be wary that consistently prioritizing the cause of the homeless youth will present the rights movement as a single-issue platform.

According to Dane Lewis, director of J-Flag, one of the greatest barriers to providing shelter for the LGBTQ homeless youth is a lack of funding. NGOs seeking to alleviate the burdens of the queer homeless youth were, and still are, locked in ongoing negotiations with both the government and international agencies for financial support that would help them address the issue on the ground. They find themselves consistently overstretched and unable to provide anything more than stop-gap support.

"The reality is such a project requires a significant investment to run a program that has been envisioned and designed by the various stakeholders invested in the response to homelessness." Lewis said. "Despite submitting proposals to major development agencies, the response has not been favorable."

McCalla-Sobers and Lewis have been spearheading efforts to set up The Larry Chang Centre, an LGBT youth homeless shelter named after the pioneering founder of J-Flag. Though they are hopeful that this year they will receive the last leg of funding needed to make the shelter a reality, the country's pervasive homophobia will likely make finding staff willing to work for an LGBTQ organization, as well as keeping the premises safe, significant challenges.

Until that happens, there are other groups in the country stepping up to help. The National Anti-Discrimination Alliance (NADA) is a Jamaican organization "committed to protecting the rights and freedoms of all people regardless of social or cultural biases." They have provided LGBTQ-friendly safe houses and private shelters for the homeless since 2014. NADA is a small-scale operation, relying largely on the kindness of volunteers willing to open their homes for those in need. When that's not an option, the group will pool their resources and rent a residential property that can be run as a safe house. The shelters can only take on a few guests at a time and operate on a word of mouth basis, but nonetheless, NADA represents a small but significant victory in the struggle to provide shelter to displaced members of Jamaica's LGBTQ community.

Andrew Higgins, founder of NADA, believes that they have so far been able to avoid becoming a target of anti-LGBTQ groups by operating as a "non-discriminatory" organization rather than a "pro-LGBTQ" organization.

The fact still stands, though, that NADA's shelters are primarily aimed at people who are newly homeless, rather than those who have been living without shelter for several years. With a high occurrence of HIV and other medical problems within the long-term LGBTQ homeless community, as well as a high rate of unemployment and training, any shelter will have to provide more than just a roof in order to see the long-term homeless youth rejoin broader society. Therefore, for shelters like NADA's with limited funding, the best strategy is to focus energies on those who have just become homeless in the hope that they can prevent them from becoming homeless in the long-term.

For McCalla-Sobers, it is the fate of the youth population who have been homeless for some years now that she is trying to address once and for all.

"They've been traumatized. Re-traumatized. And traumatized ten times on top of that. People often speak about their behavior, and I'm not sure how I would act in their place." McCalla-Sobers says. "They have made it clear to me in the past; what they really want to do is leave this country."

As it becomes clear that even when provided with shelter many among the LGBTQ homeless youth have been displaced for so long that they believe it is impossible to ever feel at home again in their own country, the need to address their circumstances is more crucial than ever.

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Learn more about the lives of queer Jamaicans on the latest episode of GAYCATION on VICELAND. Find out how to watch by clicking here.

It was exactly the kind of tragedy you'd expect a "Good Samaritan" overdose law to address.

Last July, Shane Ward overdosed on heroin and other drugs after getting high in a van with three friends. When he passed out, his friends acted quickly: One of them, 21-year-old Devan Miller, got behind the wheel and took off, calling 9-1-1. She was told to pull over, which she did, instructing another friend to perform CPR on Ward while they awaited an ambulance. When help arrived, Ward was taken to a nearby hospital, and probably owes Miller his life.

But her altruism got Miller arrested, not praised.

Rather than being offered amnesty from low-level drug charges for doing the right thing—as Illinois's Good Samaritan law suggests—Miller was handcuffed and taken in for questioning. She was charged with "aggravated battery" under the apparent contention (which she and her lawyer dispute) that she helped Ward inject himself.

Miller was also charged with driving with a revoked license, drug possession, and drug delivery—even though she had no drugs on her when she was arrested. And she remains in jail some eight months later because her family cannot afford to post the $7,500 required to secure bond.

She isn't alone, ether.

Kathleen Kane Willis, director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University, has documented at least three such prosecutions in rural counties in the state in recent years. These cases have supporters of Good Samaritan laws, which are supposed to protect people like Miller in the name of public health, thinking it's the 1980s all over again.

"It obviously acts at complete cross purposes to Good Samaritan legislation, in both spirit and letter," argues Leo Beletsky, associate professor of law and health science at Northeastern University. He sees a pattern across the country of enforcement that undermines Good Samaritan laws.

"It means basically that Good Samaritan laws are null and void," Willis adds.

The desire on part of cops and prosecutors across America to show that they're cracking down on heroin is increasingly coming into direct conflict with initiatives to prevent overdose deaths. Call it Good Samaritans vs. Drug Warriors. Spurred by the activism of grieving parents whose children were abandoned after overdose, dozens of states now have Good Samaritan laws, which are well-grounded in research showing that the most common reason people don't seek medical attention in these situations is fear of arrest. Since we know that most overdoses are witnessed, immunizing witnesses from prosecution should reduce this fear and save lives.

Unfortunately, these laws aren't all that well publicized—and now they're being threatened in a sort of twisted coda to the fading war on drugs.

In fact, most states have so-called "drug delivery" laws that allow prosecution of dealers for murder if it can be proven that someone overdosed on a product they sold. Federal law also allows lengthier sentences for dealers linked with such deaths. And in some states, like Illinois, people who try to help other drug users can get prosecuted for crimes like battery instead of murder if the victim survives the overdose.

The majority of these laws were passed in the 1980s, following widespread outrage over the coke-related death of college basketball star Len Bias. But Illinois, Kansas, and Pennsylvania passed their laws between 2011 and 2012—during the current opioid crisis—and politicians around America continue to propose new versions.

Such laws are a terrible mistake. It would be one thing if they were only applied to high-level dealers. But overwhelmingly, the people being picked up for "drug-induced homicide" or "aggravated battery" associated with overdose are those like Miller, who are struggling with addictions.

Nearly all of these prosecutions involve people who were in the room when the victim died; almost never does such a situation involve a kingpin, because they don't tend to sit around shooting up in vans. And I can tell you from personal experience that it's almost impossible to have a heroin problem without having "sold" or "delivered" the stuff at some point. That distinction, any given time, tends to be between the person who knows where to score that day and the one who doesn't.

Of course, many anguished parents of overdose victims want to punish someone for the loss of their children's lives—and prosecutors seem to take up these cases with an eye to getting justice for these families and making dealers think twice because they could face the long sentences associated with homicide.

"Although many prosecutors support Good Samaritan laws, there is a real conflict when someone actually recklessly caused death of another person and then panics and calls 9-1-1," says Josh Marquis, who has been the district attorney for Clatsop County, Oregon, since 1994, and is a spokesperson for the National District Attorney's Association. He adds, "There is a weighing test you have to go through and you can't simply grant blanket amnesty for anyone who knowingly provides a highly toxic substance which then, in turn, kills people."

Tamara Olt, an Illinois obstetrician and gynecologist who lost her son Josh to overdose at 16, once supported prosecuting such cases. In her rage and grief over losing a child so young, she wanted anyone with any responsibility for what happened to pay. "Initially, I wanted everybody prosecuted," she tells me, adding that prosecutors began pursuing drug-induced homicide charges in her son's case.

However, the police first went after the wrong dealer—and as she mourned, Olt began to see the situation very differently. She got involved with a support group for parents who had also lost children to overdose, known as GRASP, for Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing. Talking with other moms, she realized that it was only chance that her Josh was the one who had died, rather than being the one who faced homicide charges. "I've forgiven everyone associated with his death, including him and myself," she says.

In order to help others, she started the JOLT foundation in memory of her son—and she works to promote harm-reduction practices, like distributing the overdose antidote Naloxone, and Good Samaritan laws. She's even put up billboards to tell users that they will be safe from arrest if they help their friends. That's why, when she heard about Miller's case, she was outraged and went so far as to donate $1,500 to her legal defense.

Miller's lawyer, Terry Slaw, adds, "Based on the fact that my client made the call and that brought the police on the scene, she should immune from prosecution—yet she's charged with three very serious crimes."

The prosecutor in Miller's case is Jonathan Wright, the state's attorney for Logan County. He told the local paper, the Courier, that he could not comment the case. But Marquis, who's been prosecuting drug cases for years in an Oregon community with plenty of experience in heroin overdoses, says choosing to charge a low-level user in a situation like Miller's "seems like an odd prosecutorial decision."

"You don't want to discourage people from calling for help," he says.

As I see it, we've already tried a bunch of ways to discourage drug dealing through the criminal justice system with little success. How is it different if a dealer faces 15 years to life simply for selling drugs, versus facing the same kind of time because someone overdoses? Why would fear of a long sentence for drug-induced homicide prove more potent than that of a long sentence for simple drug dealing? And is the terror of doing extra time in prison for helping your friends get drugs really a deterrent if you aren't too worried about dying of overdose yourself?

This is one of many examples of how unchecked the power of prosecutors is—and another reason why we need to thoroughly revise our drug laws. Decriminalizing low-level possession would be a good start, and would help prevent users from being prosecuted as dealers. But we also need to recognize that the way we handle dealers isn't working, either.

Saving lives has to come first—it's absurd to turn a tragedy for one family into a tragedy for two by prosecuting the addicted survivor and tearing them away from their loved ones. It's time to reward people who save lives rather than try, in vain, to scare them out of addiction.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

All images courtesy of 'News Shopper'

News Shopper is London's oldest local paper, and it holds a special place in my heart. Growing up in the district of Thamesmead and Bexleyheath, two of the key areas the paper covers, News Shopper was ever present. Its team of reporters covered everything from conmen in the district of Plumstead, fleecing the elderly out of their jewelry to the time some kids in my high school were caught on film tagging up the 472 bus. I was even featured in it myself once, mentioned in passing as one of several victims in a spate of racist attacks by a local gang, helpfully named the "Racist Attackers."

Coming of age on the edge of southeast London, News Shopper's front pages were an ever-changing portrait of the weird world outside my window. Now that I've left the area, and the paper has made the jump into the digital age, it's become more like a funhouse mirror, refracting everything I loved and hated about growing up in the suburbs into absurdly shareable slices of life.

News Shopper keeps its readers abreast of the goings-on in the areas it covers, which are the London boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley, as well as north Kent. Whereas newsrooms in smaller towns might turn their eye on school fetes and local heroes, News Shopper produces a near-endless cycle of car crashes, pedophile convictions, muggings, and drug busts. Browse its Facebook page on any given day, and you're bound to come across at least one headline that'll make you wonder if we're living in end times. The 82 lost pubs of Greenwich slideshow alone is enough to send you into a catatonic frenzy of despair.

There are also stories such as the one about a man from Thamesmead, who got so high he had a bout of paranoia and called the cops because he thought someone had invaded his home, only to forget that he'd stashed a bag of heroin in his mouth. Then there's the singer from Belvedere single-handedly launching a campaign against Spanish bullfighting. Who could forget the tanker full of human effluence that spontaneously combusted in Dartford one afternoon? This is News Shopper's raison d'être: to alert you to danger and then placate you with toilet humor.

You can get stories about community cranks, hapless criminals, and bizarre accidents like these in any local paper, but there's something about these in particular that feels like they couldn't happen anywhere else. Straddled between the borders of London and Kent, places like Thamesmead, Belvedere, and Dartford are the perfect home for misplaced environmentalists, victims of their own drug psychosis, and exploding vessels of shit.

Andy Parkes is the editor of News Shopper, as well as other papers in Richmond and Wimbledon.

"I've worked at lots of newsrooms in the past‚—Belfast, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester. I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that, in general, the atmosphere and good will in this newsroom is second to none." He's the paper's longest standing editor, and it's a role he carries out with obvious relish.

He sees the News Shopper as a part of the fabric of the local community, and says he is duty-bound to report on the "nastier" crimes that happen in the area. "I have long argued that whilst a number of people see those as negative stories... If the result of publishing these stories is that the police then go and catch that person, and they're brought to justice, then I think it's a positive."

Still, he understands that in times of extreme hardship for many people, it's important to strike a balance between tales of true crime and humor.

"People appreciate a slightly light-hearted take on life. There are serious issues but they like them approached in a different type of way. News Shopper will run the weird and the wonderful. The funny thing is that you can run stories that are, on the one side of it, gruesome, and on the other side very funny, but also very sad."

Of all the stories Parkes has covered in nearly two decades at News Shopper, he finds one in particular to be the most outlandish. A 50-year-old man who lived at home with his mother died after a vibrator got lodged in his anus and perforated his bowels. Too ashamed to call for an ambulance, the man laid on his mother's sofa for five days until he died of poisoning.

Stories like that are what make News Shopper and many other local papers so compelling. They're the trashy hair salon mags of the community. All news sources exist for the whims of their audiences, but few have as innate an understanding of those whims as a local paper. Local papers know what make their readers tick on a much deeper level. The writers and editors have gone to the same schools, ridden the same buses, and gotten drunk at the same pubs. They know that there's nothing readers like more than a scandal, they know just the angle to put on it, and in the case of News Shopper, it's a special blend of bleakness and mundanity. In a time when the future of all newspapers is uncertain, this knowledge keeps the wolves from the door.

It's no secret that the rise of the internet has left print journalism in a tailspin, but the effect it's had on local papers has been particularly galling. Tech-savvy readers across the nation have been ditching their papers for screens, and the sales of regional weekly and daily papers have been in steady decline for years. As a result of this, News Shopper and hundreds of local papers like it are facing redundancies, staff shortages, strikes, and even closures.

With all that in mind, it stands to reason that papers like News Shopper would want to pump out as many eye-grabbing, stomach-wrenching stories as possible. Local news as we know it might not be around for much longer, and if stories about anal play gone terribly wrong are what keeps readers loyal in a rapidly changing news media landscape, then so be it.

"When I first came on board, even the name News Shopper was a bit negative for me, and I tried to make the word news bigger and the shopper smaller... The popularity struck me right from the start, so I quickly realized that it is what it is, and people love it."

In his time as editor, Parkes has also used the paper to campaign on a number of serious issues in the area, and one sticks out as the most daring and important.

"I campaigned at Darrent Valley Hospital to get the chief executive Anne-Marie Dean removed from her post," he says.

Back in the early 2000s, Anne-Marie Dean was the boss of Darrent Valley, a $169 million hospital in Dartford where patients were dying at an alarming rate. Branded as the worst hospital in Britain at the time, reports of bed shortages, a deadly salmonella outbreak, and a rising death toll shook the local community. "At the time it was looked on as though we were attacking the hospital, and we weren't—we just had to campaign on that issue."

News Shopper campaigned for nearly two years before Dean stood down from her post in late 2001. To this day, Parkes sees her resignation as his newsroom's greatest triumph. "That's hopefully what local papers do in communities. They're actually in that community and achieve things within it."

Ultimately, campaigns like the Darrent Valley Hospital scandal are what local papers are made for. Breaking stories that no one else could, or perhaps would, no matter how big or small. News Shopper may be strange in the extreme, but it serves a purpose and fills a need that bigger newspapers are not always able to.

Editor's Note: You might know Bun B as the Texas-based rapper, professor, and activist who's one half of the legendary Houston duo UGK. He's also VICE's newest political correspondent, reporting on the ground from the campaign trail of the strangest presidential election in recent memory.

Hello, folks. It's your friendly neighborhood rapper/educator/political correspondent, back on the campaign trail. It seems like all hell has broken loose since the last time I was out in this circus: Unfortunately, a lot of the ugliness I predicted back at my first Donald Trump rally in New Hampshire has come to pass, the byproduct of hateful rhetoric and brewing anger rearing its ugly orange head. People are no longer satisfied with dirty looks and side-eye—now, it's sucker punches and physical confrontations on the floor of political rallies. Even Trump's campaign manager has gotten in on it.

The tension isn't just palpable; we've passed that point. Between now and the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, shit is only going to get more volatile, both inside and outside of these rooms. And this week, I've come to one of watch the primary go down in one of the most contentious places in America: Arizona.

Protesters filter into the crowd of Trump supporters during a campaign rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, on March 19. Photo by Ralph Fresco/Getty Images

If you've been paying attention to what's going on in the Republican race, you know that the state has been on fire since Saturday, when Trump supporters and protesters clashed at two huge Trump rallies in Phoenix and Tucson. Now, both Democrats and Republicans are set to vote on Tuesday, and the results could take Trump one step closer to locking up the nomination—which means there's more in store.

As you are no doubt aware by now, one of the biggest issues in the presidential race this year is immigration, specifically what to do about border security and the 11 million undocumented migrants living in the US right now. Arizona has been at the center of this battle for a very long time. The loudest voice by far on the subject has been Maricopa County's Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or as he likes to refer to himself, "America's Toughest Sheriff."

For years, Sheriff Joe, as he's universally known around here, has been a right-wing celebrity, and his name is synonymous with Arizona's strident anti-immigration policies, as well as prejudice and discrimination against people of color here. His attempts to enforce state immigration laws—practices that included pulling over everyone who looked like they might be illegal immigrants—have been a thinly veiled guise for racial profiling and straight-up harassment. He's actually currently facing contempt of court charges for failing to comply with an order to stop his office's racial profiling practices.

He's also the mastermind behind Maricopa County's Tent City Jail, a desert lockup where he's demanded that all inmates wear striped jumpsuits and pink underwear, and sleep outside in tents in a place where temperatures regularly break 100 degrees. The type of human rights violations you don't actually think happen in America. I wanna see this jail, feel it. I'd spend the night, but the wife ain't having it. So I'll settle for a tour.

WATCH: Hot Air in the Deep South

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is the third largest in the country, and its headquarters in downtown Phoenix is huge, a modern building with impressive architecture and a cactus garden out front. When you walk in, you're greeted by a leather saddle and bronze boots in front of a historical display of past sheriffs; an old Underwood typewriter and ancient CB equipment sit on a desk with a rotary phone and an open register of prisoners arrested in 1904. I look at the names: Molina. Padea. Gonzales. Garcia. Mendoza. Seems like the policing practices in Maricopa County are nothing new.

We're here to ambush one of the public information officers, and hopefully schedule an interview with the sheriff. Eventually, the security guard lets us past the main door. The hallway is lined with plaques honoring horses killed in the line of duty. Upstairs, a liaison meets us and takes us into the office area, and then we see the big man himself. Except Sheriff Joe isn't big at all. Or imposing. Or rude. As it becomes clear later, he's an 80-year-old man, who thinks and acts like an 80-year-old man, which means he goes from harmless to harmful in 0.2 seconds. But among his deputies, he's unassuming and seems low-maintenance—obviously the boss, but not making a big deal about it.

He's eating from a giant bag of popcorn, and there's a moment of confusion before we realize that instead of meeting with a media flack, we're meeting with Joe himself. His office, like the walls outside, is completely covered with photos of himself and his accolades: pictures of the sheriff with various politicians, on the cover of dozens of magazines, calling an investigation into Barack Obama's birth certificate on the cover of tabloids. Sheriff Joe claims to have done more than 4,000 press interviews since taking office in the early 1990s, and I realize that we're about to get one of them. I'm a lucky ass guy.

A coffee table outside Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Grace Wyler

We start by asking him about the Trump rallies in Arizona on Saturday, both of which he attended. He launches into a long rundown of his presence at Trump events, including his endorsement of the real estate mogul back in Iowa. Eventually, he gets to the rally in Phoenix on Saturday, which took place in the Fountain Hills suburb where Joe lives, and which was the site of massive protests.

"I decided we weren't going to stop this rally like they did in Chicago, just because a few people are trying to stop it from happening," he says proudly. "So we cleared the area, we sent in the motorcade, thousands of people—it was very exciting, because I could wave to my wife on the patio, looking at thousands and thousands of people at the park."

He adds that in addition to his own deputies, there were 60 armed members of his sheriff's posse on the scene. Yeah, you read that right: Sheriff Joe has a posse—and a big one, at that. At one point, he claims, there were 3,000 civilian volunteers working for the sheriff's office in the city, sworn in by Sheriff Joe himself and policing the city under his authority. Working in conjunction with Joe's deputies, these citizen cops can actually draw down on you and make an arrest—like, in their pickup trucks or some shit. Insane shit.

For the most part, these citizen cops are self-funded—"they buy their own jeeps, their own airplanes," he tells us—but last week, Joe announced that he wants to expand the force, and will use some of the proceeds from seized weapons sales to equip the posse volunteers. "I want more volunteers," he tells us matter-of-factly. "We're fighting crime here, we're fighting terrorism. Everyday we have shootings."

An oil painting of Sheriff Joe hanging in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office headquarters in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Grace Wyler

He says this with absolutely no sign of a shit-eating grin or even a raised eyebrow. He shrugs, often. Nothing bothers this guy—that is until it bothers him, and then it's on in your life. Suddenly, I see it. This man truly gives no fucks. Like zero. He's too old to care what people think of him. And he has power: In this town, he can pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants to. So he does.

"I'm elected—I don't report to anybody," he tells us. "If Trump is elected president, I don't report to him. I report to the four million people that live here. Isn't it great to be elected? Think of that. We have three thousand sheriffs in this country. Now, I've taken a lot of heat, but you don't see anyone standing next to me."

Our fears about the power wielded by elected officials stem from people who behave like this dude. So when conservatives say they want to take power away from the federal government and give it back to state and local officials like Sheriff Joe, that's when I get fucking scared. Like walking home alone after a midnight screening of The Purge on Halloween scared.

The author and Sheriff Joe. Photo by Grace Wyler

After the interview winds down, we ask the sheriff's assistant if we can set up a time to see Tent City Jail, and she graciously obliges, scheduling a tour for us later that afternoon. For the moment, at least, it seems like the visit is working out in our favor.

The feeling turns out to be short lived. My excitement about seeing Tent City fades almost as soon as the tour begins. Our guide, a sergeant who works at the jail, tells us he's only given two tours before, and it shows. He's slow, and very deliberate, but it's only after he spends 15 minutes walking us through the various features of the Tent City lobby that we realize the tour isn't going to be what we thought it was.

We leave that room, and spend another 15 minutes in the administrative hallway, where our guide shows off an old-timey collage of contraband taken from the inmates. At this point, Grace Wyler, VICE's politics editor, and I are both starting to get anxious: We came here to see tents and inmates, not the goddamn time stamp machines and confiscated boxes of Newports. Slowly, we're starting to draw the conclusion that we've been sent on Maricopa County's version of a North Korean propaganda tour.

Immigrant inmates show off a pair of pink underwear while sitting on a bunk in the Maricopa County Tent City jail in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

Inside, that point becomes increasingly clear. Our guide and the other jail officials he introduces us to are trying to sell us on some fantasy of how good the inmates have it here, skimming over the part about forcing prisoners to sleep in Korean War–era military tents in the middle of the desert. Their main selling point is the climate-controlled day room, and how proud they are of it, with its air-conditioning and 24-hour access. The inmates can't sleep in there, of course, and spend most of their days working outside, but how can any of that be a human rights violation when there's a room to cool off in.

Then there's the fact that every inmate in Tent City is required to work, and that most of them work on chain gangs. The jail parades them out across the desert 30-deep, in irons, and then back again, where they are strip-searched and sent back to their sweltering bunks, and if they're lucky, a few climate-controlled moments in Tent City's own Xanadu, that day room. Later, though our guide conveniently neglects to mention it, I learn that even juvenile offenders are forced to work on the chain gangs. WTF.

Immigrant inmates eat breakfast at the Maricopa County Tent City jail. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

This shit has been a farce. Despite the apparent enthusiasm for publicity, it's clear that the sheriff's office has given us the runaround. The Tent City tour has revealed absolutely nothing, except a couple of empty hallways and a couple of vague shadows of striped uniforms wandering around a yard. Plus, it's 91 degrees, man—too hot for y'all to play with us like this. Inhaling dust and bullshit has taken its toll on me. Sheriff Joe may be playing with a loaded deck and trick glasses, but his jail is pretty obviously violating human rights, whether his deputies want to show it to us or not.

It's pretty obvious that, despite the federal government's attempts, no one is going to stop Sheriff Joe's crusade. And it's hard to escape the conclusion that if Trump, or someone like him, is elected president, we're going to see a lot more Sheriff Joes, popping up with their posses around this great country of ours. But fuck that. I'm starting an anti-posse. Built on standing up to the fuckery perpetrated on Americans of all races and religions. No gun required. Just love for your fellow man. Hit me up, and I'll swear you in.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Stephanie Richard

When a man attacked three people with a machete outside of a Dominican restaurant in Queens early Sunday morning, at least there seemed to be a motive. New York City police say chief suspect Guillermo Torres was jealous because the men were talking to his girl.

The same can't be said for several of the instances of blade-related violence that have darkened what has otherwise been a relatively safe year in New York City. Although a healthy chunk of the over 900 knife-related attacks so far in 2016 have been connected with domestic violence, it's the ones that occur seemingly without rhyme or reason that have people on edge. In January, at least six people were slashed on the subway, and the first few months of this year have seen local media outlets freak out about attacks inside restaurants, outside hospitals and in the middle of the street.

On Tuesday, NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton responded to knife fear. As part of a new operation helpfully dubbed 'Cutting Edge,' officers will be deployed to hotspot locations and will track the incidents separately from other felony assaults.

This is basically a test of the city's predictive policing program, which was launched on a pilot basis last summer and is all about using the numbers to deploy cops smartly. As Politico reports, Commissioner Bratton thinks this micro-targeting strategy—which expands on longstanding initiatives like COMPSTAT that closely track crime data—is the future of American policing. For example, because the numbers say slashings are most likely to occur between 7 PM and 4 AM on Fridays and Saturdays, more officers will be posted up outside of nightclubs and bars.

It will be difficult for the NYPD to "eradicate" the knife attacks, as Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday suggested was his plan. After all, the weapons used are often legal household items like boxcutters, kitchen knives, and screwdrivers; to that end, a Bratton deputy suggested local stores selling boxcutters will see some fresh scrutiny.

"They're a constant in our lives," Bratton said at a knife-focused press conference Tuesday. "They're everywhere. They're everywhere. So somebody in a moment of passion, domestic violence, dispute with a neighbor. There is a ready instrument available."

While it's unclear what exactly is driving this statistically curious and anecdotally disturbing spike in knife violence, it could, perversely, be used to slow police reform. After stop and frisk was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013 because it unfairly subjected minorities to random checks, the NYPD massively curtailed the practice. But according to research from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, city cops confiscated nearly 47,000 knifes with the legally problematic tactic between 2003 and 2012.

De Blasio and Bratton—who both like to say stop and frisk is largely in the rearview—may see that stat thrown at them as they continue to contend with knife panic.

"The NYPD backed itself out of an important tool by over-using SQF in the prior years—all for CompStat numbers," emails Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College. "Now, that could have been a tool to mitigate these incidents. From an investigation standpoint, there is no discernible pattern to analyze. They are acts of random violence that have caused concern amongst the train riding public. "

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

BC Premier Christy Clark, pictured above, recently rehired a former staffer who is facing criminal charges for deleting emails. Photo via Facebook

BC Premier Christy Clark does not particularly care what you think about her staff's unusual (and potentially criminal) email habits.

If you were an American punk rocker at the cusp of the 1980s, you had a well-defined shit list: hippies, jocks, parents, and anyone else insufficiently pissed off with the general concept of existence. But your rage, more likely than not, was somewhat directionless, a heat-seeking missile in search of a warm body. Then, on January 20, 1981, the American punk scene found both a solid adversary and catalyst when Ronald Reagan, the former California governor and movie star who was basically a 1950s cartoon of a conservative. For the next eight years, his right-wing rhetoric and policies inspired the clumpy mixture of hatred and contempt that would fuel the American hardcore punk scene for a decade.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what made Reagan so hatable in a way that his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, never was. Chalk it up to the Gipper's screwing over of the poor, his long history of going after left-wing activists, or just the way his public image (and that of his anti-feminist, anti-drug wife) made him seem like an avatar of a phony American Dream—whatever the cause, it wasn't long before anti-Reagan anthems became a bona fide subgenre.

You could point to the track "Fucked Up Ronnie" by pioneering Canadian punkers DOA, released on its 1981 EP Positively DOA. Or you could highlight songs like "Hey Ronnie" by DC's Government Issue, "Reaganomics" by Texas's D.R.I., and "If Reagan Played Disco" by Southern California's Minutemen. Nancy got plenty of hate too, in the form of tunes like New Jersey's TMA's "I'm In Love With Nancy Reagan."

That last one hinged mostly on the idea that punks yelling about fucking the first lady was self-evidently hilarious, but other bands got more explicitly political, if not more explicit. Jello Biafra and his Dead Kennedys took every chance they could get to skewer the false sense of security that Reagan doled out like creamed chipped beef, calling him a fascist warmonger and worse. (That band headlined the Rock Against Reagan concerts in 1984.) And let's not forget the San Francisco fanzine Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, which had Biafra on its masthead for the early issues. Started in the summer of 1982, MRR featured long-winded articles like "Punk Propaganda: Protest or Proselytism?" and "An Introduction to Situationist Theorists." But you didn't need to have a postgrad degree to call our tax-cutting, anti-communist, Grenada-invading, government-overthrowing president an asshole—punks will always question authority, especially an authority who looked so great with a Hitler mustache drawn above his lip, devil horns on his head, and a swastika on his sleeve.

But by the time Reagan won his second term in '84, that spark of unrest he ignited seemed to have fizzled out; maybe the hardcore scene had realized that anger alone wouldn't drive him from office, maybe singers just ran out of lyrics. Even a band like LA's Wasted Youth, whose debut LP in 1981 was titled Reagan's In, was now putting out wacky carefree records with titles like Get Out of My Yard! On the Dead Kennedy's farewell LP from 1986, Bedtime for Democracy, Biafra delivered his usual anti-Reagan rants on songs like "Rambozo the Clown" and "Gone with My Wind," but by then, it struck many as repetitive. Social awareness had become something of a tired shtick in hardcore by the late 80s, when straight edge culture ran rampant.

Punks' hatred of Reagan might seem a little dated now, but these bands rescued and reinvigorated the protest song, which by the 80s had ossified into snore-worthy crap like Genesis's "Land of Confusion" and Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning." Reagan left behind a pretty shitty legacy, but it wasn't all ignored AIDS deaths and illegal arms deals—how can you entirely hate a guy who inspired tracks like "Reagan Youth" by Reagan Youth, "White House" by Sector 4, or "Hinkley Had a Vision" by the Crucifucks?

As the 2016 presidential election approaches, it's worth looking back on all this in order to find a silver lining in the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. Sure, he's a racist, lying, orange-skinned torture enthusiast, but could he lead a punk rock revolution similar to the one we saw in the early 80s? In Trump's America, you might have to bury your collection of first-press Dangerhouse singles in your aunt's backyard like it was kiddie porn, but there's no question some great songs would be written about what would be a terrible four years for the country. All I know is, I'm about to copyright the band names Trump Youth, Trump SS, and Millions of Dead Trumps.

The author when he was a lot younger, but still way to old to be wearing a wallet on a chain.

I'm scrolling through my recent iMessages. One is from a friend explaining which of my old schoolmates she is currently in bed with. Another is just a thread of those memes where someone finds someone on Facebook called, let's say, Trudy Knight, and private messages them to say, "with a little bit of luck, we can make it Trudy Knight". But as far back as 14 messages down, they are all from women.

I know that this often treated with some suspicion. The arrival of 90s' lad culture meant we became OK with tomboy girls who are mostly friends with lads because they like fighting and farting. Shows like Will & Grace and Gimme Gimme Gimmemeans we are well-versed in the gay man/female best friend stereotype, but a straight man having mostly female friends - there's no term for it, no stereotype to draw from. As such, people tend to assume that male-female friendship is just a cover for romantic feelings. A survey last year found that 63 percent of people believe there is some kind of ulterior romantic motive in male-female friendships, and of those people, 61 percent thought the man was more likely to to try and turn friendship into something more.

I am a heterosexual man and most of my close friends are women, and I have been wondering for a long time why this is. It's not, as 63 percent of you are assuming, because I secretly want to bonk them. I am very sure about who I'm attracted to, and really bad at keeping it quiet. I would not last five minutes in a false-friends-unrequited-love situation. The only time this has happened, it lasted three days and we ended up snogging against a Burger King. It's not even an active choice. It's actually a nightmare when you're trying to get an even gender split for a dinner party, or if everyone is doing drugs in the toilet without you. Yet I feel like I naturally fall into female friendships. In fact, it happens so often now that I know the tell-tale signs. Partly, I'm sure it's because I like things that a lot of girls like: shaming celebrities and the music of Ariana Grande. But it's more than that. I simply assume the position, sitting side-by-side, no eye contact, someone from work telling me about some sordid thing they did on the weekend, me occasionally asking questions and passing judgement.

It's not that I am not interested in boy things. I got into football later than most, but I have a lot of other male-friendly ephemeral interests: US television, graphic novels, gambling, hip-hop and, crucially, girls and that. I enjoy making puerile jokes, I enjoy getting so drunk I loudly sing "Dakota" by the Stereophonics on my way home. I really think I have all the makings of a modern lad.

All photos by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE Greece

On March 22, Europe woke up to the tragic news of yet another terrorist attack, which left 34 people dead, at least 198 injured, and a country in shock. At around 8 AM, two explosions ripped through Brussels International Airport and, shortly after, another bomb hit the Maalbeek Metro station—just a few hundred feet from the European Commission and EU Council buildings. A few hours later, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks through a statement issued in Arabic and French.

According to the latest numbers made public by the Greek government, more than 47,500 refugees and immigrants are currently trapped in Greece, while some 10,500 are still in Idomeni—the Greek-FYROM buffer zone. Once I heard about the attacks in Brussels, I began to wonder how that would affect European policy and opinion on refugees. So I spoke to a few refugees and immigrants in Athens after Europe's border closures to find out how they feel about the attacks at the heart of Europe.

Khaled Chouail, 28, teacher from Algeria

"People need to understand that men who are loyal to the Islamic State are terrorists and they have nothing to do with Islam. Allah never claimed that wars need to be fought. Europe is at war right now, and all this panic creates a suffocating environment against Muslim people. Sometimes I think these are deliberate attacks, aiming to drive immigrants away from Europe. Jihadists are not religious people; they are driven by political motives. That's precisely why most of the victims of terrorism in the world are Muslims.

Do you think leaving my wife and child back in Algeria and living a life on the streets here is fun for me? I've made three illegal attempts to cross the border, and every time I was captured by Macedonian police, beaten up, and sent back to Greece. I'm very scared of what the future might bring. At first, I thought the hardest part would be to enter Europe. Now I know it's almost unbearable to live here. But, unfortunately, I have no choice."

Amal, 45, and Ahmed, 16, from Syria

"I don't know anything about the terrorist attacks in Belgium—I just arrived with my son in Athens. We're waiting for the train to Thessaloniki and from there we'll get to Idomeni. We'll be waiting near the border, hoping it will eventually open again. What you're telling me is horrible. I honestly can't believe it.

The Islamic State took everything from us. We've lost our loved ones, our homes, our lives. Syria is wrapped in flames and no one is doing anything about it. We came to Europe to escape jihadists only to find they are ruining people's lives here too. I believe Europe will get scared and we'll be moved back to Syria or Turkey. But my family and I have no choice but to keep going, no matter what."

Amal, 27, and Ganda, 52, Palestinians from Syria

"I have two little children who are four and six years old. All I want is to find my husband in Germany and start over our life. I'm very sorry for what happened in Brussels. People need to know that the majority of Muslims are not extremists and they don't identify with jihadists. On the contrary: We're trying to get away from them. I'm afraid that after these attacks, borders will never open again and everyone will be suspicious of us."

Ibrahim Mustafa, 18, student from Afghanistan

"I fled Afghanistan with just one dream—to finish school. My family and I are looking for a better life, and now we're trapped in Greece with no money. We had no choice but to find shelter in the Eleonas Refugee Camp. That's where we found out about the attacks. We've been upset all morning, because we know that now things will be even harder for us. I'm worried about my future, but I also fear people's reactions. Right now, my dream to reach Germany and finish school seems even harder to realize. Probably impossible."

Tajagul, 23, unemployed, from Afghanistan

"I was afraid of bombings and attacks in Afghanistan and now here they are again. It's stupid to associate refugees with jihadists. We're trying to escape the war and rebuild our lives. Why would we bomb anyone? I'm afraid people will be racist towards us. I've heard about immigrants being attacked. I don't know, all I know is I'll be waiting in Greece until I find a way to go to Germany."

Mohammed Waqas, 20, engineer from Pakistan

"I've been in Greece for four months and all this time I've been sleeping in a tent in the Pedion Areos Park. I don't know what I'm going to do. I took a shot at crossing the border illegally, but I didn't make it. I just tried to apply for asylum, but the people in charge told me I'm not eligible for it. And today I found out about the Brussels attacks. I feel really sorry for the bombing victims and I believe this situation will harm us even more."

Abdul Hadi, 43, lorry driver from Afghanistan

"People behind these attacks have got nothing to do with jihad and our religion. I don't know what to do. I'm desperate—I have no money, no job, nothing. I'm now in Greece with my wife and six children and I had decided to stay here until they would open the borders. But now I've lost all hope that is going to happen. There are too many policemen everywhere and they keep giving us dirty looks. I think there are many racist people who don't want us in Europe. After the attacks in Brussels, I believe things can only change for the worse for us. But where can we go? We're caught between a rock and a hard place."

Photo via Instagram user Jonathan Stutz

I don't know when America broke, but everyone knows that it's broken. Our bridges are crumbling, our water is poisoned, our young people are in debt, our cities have been decimated by the cold math of economics, and one of our leading presidential candidates foments hate and fear wherever he goes. We have Netflix and the internet and smartphones, but this just makes our broader misery worse, somehow—if we can make it possible to watch Better Call Saul on a tiny glowing rectangle anytime we want, can't we do anything about the waves of poverty and despair crashing into us? You feel it in your bones that someone ought to do something, but who or what is just a mist in your mind; thinking about it for too long makes you clench with an anger that you can't do anything with. It's enough to make you want to climb a tree, just climb and climb and climb until you can't anymore and then sit there, yelling things that no one can understand.

In downtown Seattle yesterday, that's exactly what one guy did. And he's still up there.

According to local news channel KIRO 7, this guy began clambering up an 80-foot sequoia in the heart of Seattle around 11 AM local time Tuesday, and has refused to come down. No one seems to know who he is, why he's up there, or (most importantly) how to get him down. The police have approached him, but he responded by throwing apples at them. Then, when he ran out of apples, he threw sticks and pinecones.

A soldier stands in front of the European Commission, 400 feet away from the Maelbeek subway station. All photos by Bertrand Vandeloise

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

Once the world found out that three of the terrorists who committed the attacks in Paris last November grew up in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, the area became known as a "hotbed for terrorists." This week, the news that the fugitive suspect Salah Abdeslam managed to stay out of the hands of the Belgian anti-terror units for 126 days by hiding out in Molenbeek, gave way to even more suspicion surrounding the area. After the terrorist attacks on the Brussels airport and subway system yesterday, a number of news crews traveled straight to Molenbeek to see how the locals reacted to the events.

Freelance journalist Paul Schram went to the market in Molenbeek yesterday—which was open for business as usual. We asked him to describe the atmosphere in the neighborhood.

Since yesterday's attacks, Brussels has been on high alert. Special forces, the police, and the army shut down the entire city center. Maalbeek station is only a stone's throw away from the Berlaymont building, which houses the European Commission. Near Maalbeek, cars were being checked and bags were being overturned, while the streets were full of police vans coming and going.

Once word of the attacks got out, the rest of the city center quickly turned eerily quiet. Most citizens of Brussels followed the advice of Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel to stay indoors. Because the tunnels in the center were shut down, it was almost impossible to get around in the city, anyway. Only emergency services were allowed to use the tunnels, and in large parts of the city, the only vehicles you could see on the road were police cars, military vehicles, and a lot of ambulances. Trams and busses had come to a standstill—as if someone had shut them down with one push of the button.

Soldiers and a tank in front of the European Commission offices, March 22, 2016

The hunt for the perpetrators was still in full swing around midday in the center of Brussels. Near the metro station, the DOVO (the bomb disposal unit) checked a car for explosives, but that turned out to be a false alarm.

Yesterday morning, just after the attacks, I visited Molenbeek—the neighborhood of Brussels that recently gained a reputation as a "hotbed for terrorists." Two days earlier, a police officer had told me that the arrest of Salah Abdeslam would mark only the beginning of the "cleanup" of Molenbeek. Apparently, there are another 21 terrorist suspects on the police's wanted list. The list is posted in the police office around the corner from the market square in Molenbeek. The Abdeslam family lived on the same square.

That square mile is where three out of the five terrorists who committed the attacks in Paris came from. This impoverished area that stands adjacent to the center of Brussels has both the youngest population and the highest rate of unemployment in the city.

While Brussels was on lockdown yesterday morning, Molenbeek certainly was not. The market on the Hertogin van de Brabantplein was filled with a large number of greengrocers, shouting salesmen, and clothing stands. A Flemish baker hadn't dismantled his stall yet, despite the authorities asking everyone to stay indoors. "I have to make a living, and the people here will come anyway; that attack has already happened now," he said matter-of-factly.

A middle-aged man seemed annoyed when I asked him if he sympathizes with the victims: "If you hurt them, they'll hurt you! That's what Belgium gets for joining in on the war on terror."

A Flemish-speaking woman of Moroccan decent who was wearing a hijab, shook her head when she heard the news. "Again, they're looking at us; everyone is pointing to Molenbeek yet again." A few kids that were hanging around on the street got furious when they saw me and my colleague: "Reporters! Scum! Get out of here!" they shouted.

A couple of streets away, in the Vier-windenstraat, baker Omar looked out on the house where Abdeslam was arrested earlier this week. He was saddened by the news of the attacks and wanted to close his shop for the day. He said he had been glad to hear of the arrest of the terrorist: "It felt like the tumor had finally been removed from Molenbeek."

Before I left, I talked to a shoe salesman who also works at the market: "A couple of lunatics commit a terrorist attack, and people immediately look in our direction. I am deeply ashamed that some Muslims do things like this. And a lot of people here feel the same way," he sighed.

At dusk, hundreds of Belgium citizens spontaneously gathered in front of the Bourse in Brussels, to sing, pray, and write peace messages.

Charles Michel, prime minister of Belgium, waves to the crowd during a spontaneous gathering at la Bourse, in Brussels.

This is just a regular guy reading a newspaper. Photo via Flickr user photos.de.tibo.

Two Trail, BC girls mistakenly identified a man they saw at a restaurant as a "pedophile" on Facebook, causing the townsfolk to lose their shit.

The girls, aged 12 and 13, posted a photo of the man on Facebook because they believed he was acting suspiciously and taking photographs of them. The post, "stirred up a bit of a frenzy," RCMP Cpl. Devon Reid told the CBC, and the man's daughter eventually came across it and informed authorities.

But when cops investigated, they found the man had done nothing wrong and was in fact just reading the newspaper with his phone out.

"There was a lot of misinformation shared and by the time everyone shared it, it was like a broken telephone game," Reid said.

Despite the post being taken offline, cops say the damage was done. The attention it garnered led staff at a local grocery store to detain a customer they believed was the man from the post. They held him until police showed up and confirmed the customer done nothing wrong, and that the man from the Facebook post was also entirely innocent.

"It was a non-criminal event, what he was doing was definitely not illegal and posting it to Facebook when you don't have all the facts can make things worse," Reid said.

Ironically, the two girls are now facing backlash for their mistake, according to police, although they did not give specifics.

There is a growing network of self-described pedophile hunters across the country who confront people they believe to be child predators. However, police advise against this tactic, arguing the vigilantes don't fully understand the law and could be putting themselves at risk.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Commuting is draining. Going to work is draining. Talking to anyone unpleasant is draining. All we are is fat lumps of flesh traversing through our days giving out our energy—positive or shitty—to other lumps around us. It's a law of physics: for every action there is a reaction. Even if you have absolutely no inclination towards spirituality or ideas about energy, you can accept that if you're sitting feeling awful, seething with resentment, and thinking about death, in some way that's going to affect the poor bastards around you. It goes the other way too. Even if someone you hate is delighted that day and giving out compliments and smiling, you'll frown, grunt, and maybe hate them a little bit less in that moment.

Imagine, then, that you're one of the biggest celebrities in the world. People pay up to $2,000 to enter into your space and interact with you in some small way. That would have an effect of sorts. This is precisely what Justin Bieber has found.

On Wednesday he posted on his Instagram that sadly, he has had to cancel the meet-and-greets on his Purpose tour because he is feeling the strain. "I end up feeling so drained and filled with so much of other people's spiritual energy that I end up so drained and unhappy," Bieber wrote. "Want to make people smile and happy but not at my expense and I always leave feeling mentally and emotionally exhausted to the point of depression. Can't tell you how sorry I am, and wish it wasn't so hard on me... And I want to stay in the healthy mindset I'm in to give you the best show you have ever seen ;)."

Fans might have not reacted well ("You're paid millions of dollars thanks to those fans who drain you. Sorry your life is sooo hard" being the one of the general responses), but money is money and celebrities and labels and management like money and meet and greets make a lot of it. They're engrained in the tour cycle of being a popstar, too.

How could JB have limited this energetic damage? How can meet-and-greets become sustainable? Is it even safe to be doing this on a semi-regular basis? We rang up Martha Brett, a spiritual and psychic healer, who specializes in clearing people of unwanted energies.

VICE: Let's talk meet-and-greets. Energetically, how does that set-up work? Lots of excited, emotional people ready to aim all their energy at their idol?
Martha Brett: Exactly. And not only aiming at him, but also taking away his energy. There's sometimes a psychic cording happening where the fan or the public will want so much to be connected with the person that they will physically connect to a part of that person's body and take away their energy. And when Bieber is shaking hands with someone, he is giving his energy away. It goes two ways. This person that does have physical contact is probably a very caring person and is nice but it's draining nonetheless. Everyone wants something from him. This is what seems to be happening to him now.

What would you suggest he can do?
I'd say he should begin a careful meditation practice that he should do before he goes to the meet-and-greets. Center himself, make sure he's grounded, make sure his chakras are desensitized, and that he's not wide open. This will help protect him from anyone trying to connect with him physically. There are exercises he can do; for example, he could imagine himself in a big bubble of light: six feet wide, above his head, all the way around, under his feet. On the outside, put mirrors or anything shiny to deflect energy away from him. His intention during this is that he's not going to receive any negative energy, which means he'll protect himself. If the bubble does not work for him, then he can imagine shields around him. Only love and light are allowed to come through. That way it won't pick up anything negative. Have him have those shields about elbow to wrist length around him.

Will that make him have a shitty, disconnected meet-and-greet with fans though?
It's not keeping people away, it's just keeping his energy intact. Imagine your intention.

What if he's not into meditation?
Other practical tips are to make sure he's hydrated with drinking water. If he likes crystals, a black tourmaline is great. It's grounding and provides psychic protection. It basically creates a psychic shield. That could be in his pocket or around his neck or wrist that's fine. But it needs to be cleaned every day or every time he's done one of these meet-and-greets under cold water. If he's feeling run-down from illness from these fans then just think and have that intention that you will not pick up illness from them.

Great. So after the meet-and-greet, what can he do to get rid of any lingering energy?
He should go home and have a sea salt bath. Just a handful of salt in the bath, sit in for ten or 15 minutes, wash in that water. If he could lay in the bath and put his head in the bath, that's ideal. If not, just pour the water over himself. After that time, shower off and use his own products. Salt water's really good for cleansing. There are other ways but I don't know if he has any spiritual practice...

He's Christian, I believe.
He could also wear a crucifix because that will work as protection. Before he goes out he could say a little prayer. Ask Archangel Michael for protection. It's up to him to see what works for him.

Do you think this whole thing is a difficult, trying practice? Would you do a meet-and-greet, knowing all that you know?
No. I don't touch many people and I don't let them touch me. I limit that contact. If I'm seeing somebody, I don't shake their hands until after the session. A change of energy could be that strong, could be that quick. Even though I'm protected, I don't know what they're bringing in until I see them.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.